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Rebecca Fox Stoddard
August 2025
“Threads” Are my Rabbit Holes in Written Ramblings. Beware.
What began as a simple phone call—an offer to help my daughter prepare map legends, and symbol cheat sheets for “Mapping Shapes of Alarm” in her forest school class—led me down a multi-day path of reflection and research.
What started as a resource for her lesson became a reflective map of its own. Each thread that follows traces part of that unfolding: from field awareness to animal sensing systems, from parenting presence to contemplative emptiness. What was meant to be a teaching tool turned out to be a return—to older questions, new language, and the edge between observation and relationship.
I still haven’t finished the map legends. Or even started. That’s next.
This detour surfaced unexpected insights—about emptiness, about pressure, and about the way presence moves through relationships
See also The Mind Has Shape: Practicing Emptiness with the Birds as Feedback.
Rabbit Holes
The late night wandering of my thoughts.
1.Mapping Shapes of Alarm with my Daughter
2. The Art of Emptiness and Pressure in the Field
3.Major Biological Pathways: Letter to my Brother-in-Law
4.Emptiness and Non-Reaching in Parenting as Reflective Practice
5.Reading the Concentric Waves of Response
6.Intrapersonal Pressure—Emptiness, Meditation and Presence
7.The Five Voices of Bird Language
8.Baseline and the Return to Song
9.Mapping Ripples through the Field
10.Glossary
Thread Zero: Mapping Shapes of Alarm with my Daughter
A Return to the Forest
This thread began with a phone call from my daughter, who was getting ready to lead her forest school class that morning. She wanted to teach the children how to map shapes of alarm—those invisible but traceable movement patterns that ripple through the bird world in response to disturbance. She remembered that we had once taught a whole-year curriculum centered around this and I told her I still had the materials.
Remembering the Old Maps
I scoured my digitized field notes from 15 years ago—scraps of trail maps, sketches of escape trajectories, old bird language curriculum from our earlier forest school days together. I remembered children lying belly-down in the leaves, drawing loops and spikes in the air with their fingers, trying to trace the flight pattern of birds. I remembered how we used to sit still until the forest or meadow accepted us again, then practiced decoding the story behind each flush, each call, each ring in the pond of silence.
The Seed of a Study Guide
I told her I’d gather all my old materials and make a new study guide. But as I started to do that, I realized how much I had changed. What I knew then about shapes of alarm was just the surface. What I’ve learned since—about pressure, emptiness, non-reaching, and how the land reads us—made me want to start fresh. Not just for her students, but for us. For the mentors, the parents, the field naturalists trying to understand not just what birds do—but why they do it in response to us.
Where the Threads Led Me
That’s what sent me tumbling down this long path—into deeper layers of bird language, nervous system attunement, field presence, and eventually contemplative practice. That’s where Thread One began, and then Thread Two. But this thread—the phone call, the remembering, the moment I said I’ll pull it together for you—that’s where it all started.
Bird Lists vs. Patterns and Moods of the Forest
There’s a real difference between being a birder and practicing bird language. I’ve never been great at bird identification—not in the way birders are. I can’t reliably tell a song sparrow from a white-throated one. I forget field marks. I misidentify songs. And yet, I’ve spent over thirty years teaching in the woods, listening closely. What I’ve been listening to isn’t so much who the bird is—but what it’s doing, why, and with whom.
Bird language, especially the way Jon Young teaches it, is less about classification and more about relationship. It’s closer to ethology than taxonomy. Shapes of alarm, contact calls, baseline, wave patterns—these are about the interactions between birds and their environment, including you. You don’t need to name the species to sense the shift in energy when a jay sets off a ripple, or when the woods hold a nervous hush.
I’ve come to realize it’s a matter of proclivity. Some people love lists and Latin names. I care more about the patterns, the moods of the forest, the invisible threads that connect behavior across species. I track tone more than ID. I’m not a birder. I’m not a scientist. I’m a listener. A pattern watcher. A relationship keeper.
1st Thread: The Art of Emptiness and Pressure in the Field
Field Notes – Internal Language, Scientific-Intuitive Blend
We began with the problem of presence. At the heart of this thread was a deceptively simple question: How can I enter a natural space without disturbing it? Not just physically—but energetically, relationally, ethically. This inquiry led us into the practice of observing without disturbing, but we quickly found that phrase doesn’t just describe a technique. It describes a transformation.
Where the Thread Opened
This didn’t begin as a question about sound or movement. It began a difference in how the forest feels when certain people enter. Experienced trackers don’t just step lightly—they carry less. Less demand, less story, less projection. What emerged wasn’t just about technique. It was about presence itself. That’s when the word pressure surfaced—not as a metaphor, but as a phenomenological construct. What is it that birds and deer feel before we’ve made a sound?
What Pressure Might Be
Pressure seems to describe the subtle field of influence a human emits—composed not only of physical cues like muscle tone or breath rhythm, but of mental posture, emotional resonance, and intention. The body may be still, but the inner field often isn’t. Animals appear to respond to this composite: the outward behavior plus the internal waveform. I’m wondering now if we can map pressure not just ecologically, but neurologically. Is this the convergence point of proprioception, affective regulation, and sympathetic signaling?
Emptiness as Non-Interference
Emptiness here isn’t passive. It’s a trained release of grasp—of attention that tightens, of will that pushes, of identity that wants to be known. When this lets go, a kind of transparency opens. You don’t vanish, but you stop displacing. The birds don’t ignore you—they recalibrate. Stillness returns. I keep circling around the idea that the forest offers not only feedback, but instruction: when you disturb less, you learn more.
2nd Thread: Major Biological Pathways
Then I got caught up in exploring Major Biological Pathways.
Animals are not just watching and listening. They are sensing—through layers of perception that most humans no longer track. To be in the field is to be known by others, often before you even arrive. Your presence registers not just to ears and eyes, but to systems wired for electricity, vibration, scent, and direction. What we call “quiet” may still land like thunder in another being’s world.
This section doesn’t aim to catalog everything, but to open a question: How are we perceived? And what happens when we begin to take seriously the idea that we are always in relationship—not just with animals we can see, but with sensory systems tuned to our movement, intention, even our inner state?
Some of these pathways are well-documented in the scientific literature. Others live in that liminal space of field observation—described by trackers, hunters, and naturalists, but not yet easily measured. And still others belong to a different kind of knowing: the felt sense of being watched, the ripple of awareness that moves through a flock before sound or motion, the inexplicable stillness that precedes a sudden flush. These may not all be testable, but they are, for many of us, repeatedly observable.
Here are some of the known and emerging sensory systems animals use to detect presence:
Electroreception. Some fish, especially sharks and rays, can detect the electric fields generated by muscle contractions and neural activity in other animals. This isn’t subtle—it’s precise enough to locate buried prey under sand. My brother in law
Magnetoreception. Birds, sea turtles, and some mammals can orient themselves using Earth’s magnetic field. In birds, it’s thought to involve specialized photoreceptor cells in the eye, or tiny magnetite crystals in the beak—though the exact mechanisms remain partially unclear.
Vibrational Sensitivity. From elephants picking up subsonic rumbles through the ground, to spiders sensing web tension, to deer feeling human footfall on packed dirt, vibration is a constant layer of information that bypasses our own awareness.
Chemosensory Input. Smell and taste—and in some animals, pheromone detection—convey enormous amounts of data about who has passed, how recently, and what condition they were in. Wolves, bears, insects, and even birds use scent trails in ways far beyond what most humans consider.
Lateral Line Systems. In fish and amphibians, a line of mechanoreceptors along the body picks up changes in water pressure and movement. This allows schooling fish to respond almost instantly to the shift of a neighbor—far faster than vision alone could manage.
Infrared and Thermal Sensing. Pit vipers and some insects can detect heat from warm-blooded animals. This is presence as temperature gradient—a layer of visibility we never notice but always give off.
Echolocation and Ultrasound. Bats, dolphins, and certain cave-nesting birds emit sound and read the returning echoes. It’s not just for navigation—it’s for sensing you.
3rd Thread: I realized this inquiry lives close to home, researching this, I came across my brother-in-law’s research.
Dear P,
As you know, I’ve carried this long-standing question of why I seem to have a special relationship with crows and other animals—especially crows—who seem to trust me in a way that’s hard to explain. That trust has deepened my need to understand pressure, and emptiness, and presence—not just poetically, but biologically.
Oddly enough, this path led me straight to the science of pressure, and from there, to your work on electroreception in weakly electric fish. It’s been fascinating to see how these ideas converge.
I’ve read several of your papers that I came across—and I certainly don’t understand them all—but there were things in them that really sparked my interest. Here are a few thoughts I’m pondering, as someone reflecting more from a field-based, cross-species, “being with” lens:
I was thinking about how animals manage their visibility—not just whether they’re seen, but how they’re sensed. And I was reading about electric fish and came across one of your articles on Hypopomus where you described something I found incredible: that these fish can actually cloak parts of their electric signal to avoid being detected by predators. It made me stop and wonder—how common is that kind of ability across other electric fish species? Is this something a lot of them can do, or is it a rare adaptation? And do they use it all the time, or only when they’re under threat?
While I was sitting with that idea—about fish managing how detectable they are—it made me think more broadly about signal variation. I started wondering: in places where there’s more predation pressure, do electric fish tend to have more complex or harder-to-detect signals? Like, are there differences in waveform complexity between species or even between populations depending on how dangerous their environment is? It seems like that kind of variation would be an important clue about how electric signaling evolves in real-world conditions
Another thing that really struck me was the idea that electric fish can modulate their signals in real time—not just as a fixed trait, but something that shifts with social context or internal state. I read that hormones like serotonin or melanocortins can influence the amplitude or shape of the signal, and I started thinking of it almost like a kind of body language—an electric presence that changes depending on who’s nearby or what’s going on. I’m curious how that plays out in the field. Do you see clear behavioral patterns tied to those shifts? And how fast or fluid are those changes in real-time social interactions?
The more I read, the more I kept circling back to a bigger question behind all of this—why these signals evolved the way they did. On one hand, they seem shaped by predation—needing to stay hidden. But on the other hand, they’re also used in social and sexual communication, which seems to pull in the opposite direction: be seen, be chosen. I’d love to hear your take on that balance. In your view, how much of electric signal evolution is driven by sexual selection versus predator avoidance? And does that balance shift depending on the species or environment?
As I’ve been thinking about all this—especially how animals detect presence across these subtle channels—I keep coming back to something I experience a lot in the field: that strange sense of being watched before anything moves. Or the way a flock reacts before there’s any obvious trigger. And I wonder—are there places in your own research where what you observed in the wild didn’t quite match what the instruments could measure? Times when the behavior seemed to suggest a kind of perception we don’t yet have tools to fully track? I’m thinking about where the edge of the science meets what you’ve felt or seen firsthand.
I know I’m wandering in from a different angle than a lab scientist, but your writing has helped me make connections that I wouldn’t have seen otherwise. I don’t know that I even need “answers” as a non-biologist, but the threads were exciting to follow! Grateful for going down this Rabbit Hole and finding you.
Rebecca
Enough biology. Now back to ethology, presence, and pressure from a field perspective.
4th Thread: Emptiness and Non-Reaching in Parenting, as Reflected by the Birds
Research Notes Recap
There’s a way the birds tell you something about yourself that you didn’t ask to know. You enter with an intention—helpful, caring, even soft—and still, they pull back. A robin pauses mid-forage. A junco tilts its head, unreadable. The land gives you the feedback before your child does.
In the forest, you learn quickly that quiet isn’t emptiness. You can be still, and still be full of reaching. Full of ideas, corrections, encouragements. Children feel it the same way. Something in their body responds to the grasp in you. They pull back, go tense, shift the rhythm of their play. That’s their flush. That’s their chip call.
The mirror the birds offer becomes a kind of training. Not in behavior, but in field presence. What it feels like to be with a child without reaching into their space. Not numbly absent—but alert, attuned, non-interfering. This is the shape of relational emptiness.
It changes everything. You don’t praise the drawing. You sit beside it. You don’t fix the frustration. You breathe with it. You don’t prompt the play. You follow the current.
This isn’t a new parenting technique—it’s a new kind of listening. The birds offer the tuning fork. They show you when your awareness is soft enough for others to remain themselves.
5th Thread: Reading the Concentric Waves of Response
This thread began with the image of a ripple—not just in water, but in the field of awareness that surrounds any living place. Trackers have long noticed that when one bird flushes, another follows. A single jay’s bark can send waves of tension through an entire area. But the pattern isn’t random. It rings outward.
These concentric waves of response—what we’re calling “rings”—offer a way to read the land’s nervous system. They show you where pressure originates, how far it spreads, and who it touches. The idea is simple: every disturbance has a center. Whether that’s you, a fox, or a gust of wind, the ring reveals direction, magnitude, and relational proximity.
But the deeper insight is that rings don’t only reflect the outside world—they reflect you. The forest reads your state before you speak. A tight jaw, a quick breath, even a thought with direction can cause a shift. If you’re sensitive, you’ll feel it bounce back. If you’re not, the birds will show you.
I explored this thread through both biological and contemplative lenses. Biologically, birds and mammals signal and respond in sequence. The flush of a towhee can precede the alarm of a robin, which then stirs a nuthatch. Behavior stacks. Emotion transmits. Nervous systems sync.
But for the practitioner—especially one walking with children or sitting in silence—these rings become a mirror. They show whether your awareness is grasping or wide, interfering or receptive. Noticing the rings becomes a practice in calibration. Noticing your effect becomes part of the learning.
This thread also introduced tools: mapping ripples, scripting audio meditations, creating glossaries of field terms, and reflecting on the parenting implications of subtle pressure. It marked a shift from just seeing birds to feeling relationship.
6th Thread: Intrapersonal Pressure—Emptiness, Meditation, and the Inner Field
This thread turns the lens inward. Where previous threads tracked the ripples we send into the forest, here we ask: what’s rippling inside us?
Just as the land reacts to pressure from a person’s presence, we too carry fields of tension within our own minds and bodies. This intrapersonal pressure shows up as subtle grasping—toward goals, identities, avoidance, or control. Even in silence, the mind can pulse with strain.
Stillness in the woods does not mean stillness in the self.
This thread maps how field pressure begins inside: in the mind’s clenching, the nervous system’s bracing, the breath’s rigidity. The practice of emptiness—whether in meditation or deep listening—is not about disconnection. It’s about ungrasping. Letting go not of the world, but of the self’s demand upon it.
From a scientific lens, we begin with the Default Mode Network, associated with self-referential thought and rumination. This mental background hum often generates subtle pressure even when no outer movement occurs. From a contemplative lens, early Buddhist teachings describe the release of this pressure through calming (samatha), tranquility (passaddhi), and ultimately non-identification (anattā).
The question becomes: can we let the inner field relax enough to stop generating ripples?
When we do, the effect is not only personal—it becomes environmental. Birds return. Children soften. The land quiets. And the feedback loop completes itself: emptiness inside makes space outside.
This sub-thread braids Buddhist practice, neuroscience, and real-world awareness. It is not merely philosophical—it is diagnostic. The field mirrors the self.
WRITING There’s something else that starts to happen when we truly embody this state: the boundary between observer and environment begins to loosen. Not dissolve completely—but soften. You’re not watching the woods anymore. You’re in them, with them. The edges of perception blur. You begin to feel things before you think them.This is where traditional trackers say things like, “I just knew to look left,” or “the trail opened itself to me.” It’s not superstition. It’s attunement reaching the level of fluency. You’re not empty like a vacuum. You’re empty like a vessel—shaped just right for the song the land is trying to sing.
In these moments, perception becomes relational. You’re not gathering information. You’re receiving communication. The land begins to “look back.” The silence becomes reciprocal.
And this is the real heart of it: emptiness is what allows relationship. Not dominance, not distance, not even knowledge—but space. And in that space, something wild steps closer—not just the animal, but the world itself. The world that doesn’t need you to be good or skilled or wise. Just not grasping.
7th Thread: The Five Voices of Bird Language
When you first hear birdsong, it might sound like music. But in the language of the forest, it’s more like a weather report—accurate, dynamic, and full of layered meaning. Birds are constantly communicating, and when we learn to listen carefully, we begin to hear not just birds, but the shape of the moment itself.
Jon Young, in What the Robin Knows, teaches a framework called the Five Voices of Bird Language. It’s a way of recognizing what the birds are saying—not in human words, but in finely tuned responses to their world. And it turns out: we’re in that world too.
Every step we take, every breath we bring, shapes the field of awareness that birds are constantly reading. They tell the truth about us. They signal our emotional footprint long before we speak or move loudly. Learning their language isn’t just about listening to them—it’s about listening to ourselves in their presence.
Here are the five core voices, as Jon Young frames them:
1. Song
The long, complex vocalizations most associated with spring mornings and mating season. Song signals safety. It marks territory, invites mates, and announces, "All is well here."
If birds are singing in your presence, they have likely assessed you as non-threatening. This is what Jon calls baseline—a state of calm, ongoing life.
2. Companion Call
Short, regular chips or chirps between flockmates to maintain contact. It’s like an ongoing "I’m here."
This voice also indicates baseline, but it’s more sensitive. A break or shift in companion calls often occurs just before alarm—an early indicator that the field has changed.
3. Territorial Aggression
Birds can sound loud and combative with members of their own species. This includes chase flights, wing flicking, and harsh calls.
This voice is not about danger to the whole landscape, but rather inter-bird conflict—important to distinguish from alarm. Many beginners confuse this for predator response.
4. Begging
Juveniles peeping and whining for food. This is high-volume, low-threat sound—heard mostly in nesting season.
It marks vulnerability, yes, but also a state of trust. If begging is happening nearby, the adult birds have deemed the area relatively safe.
5. Alarm
Sharp, repetitive calls. Sometimes it’s a single sentinel (like a jay); sometimes it cascades through many species. It can also take the form of silence, when all other voices vanish.
This is the voice of disruption. Of predator. Of pressure. Of you, if you arrive with intensity, need, or directed energy. It’s not about noise. It’s about resonance.
Learning these voices is the beginning of bird language. But recognizing their transitions is the beginning of self-awareness. When song stops and alarm begins, you’ve crossed a threshold. Something in you has entered the field.
And the gift of this system is: the birds will tell you when you’ve been accepted again.
8th Thread: Baseline and the Return to Song
If the birds are singing, the forest is calm. This state—known as baseline—isn’t a fixed condition. It’s a pattern of ongoing, ordinary life. Mating, feeding, preening, begging, chasing, resting, singing. A landscape at ease.
In Jon Young’s teaching, baseline is the gold standard of the field. It’s the moment when the birds are no longer reacting—they’re simply living. To enter this baseline state as a human is to disappear in the best possible way—not because you’re hidden, but because you’re not causing ripples. You’ve been absorbed. The system has scanned you and found nothing it needs to brace against.
Baseline is fragile. It shatters easily under pressure—not loudness, but presence that presses. This could be tension in your step, intensity in your gaze, urgency in your thoughts. It could be an internal demand: to see something, to learn something, to be somewhere. Animals read all of that. And the birds—especially the songbirds—are the first to respond.
So when song returns after you've arrived, it’s a kind of nonverbal reentry. You were seen. You were felt. But now, you’ve been let back in.
This is not just about birds. It’s about who you are when you walk into a space that isn’t built for you.
9th Thread: Shapes of Alarm: Mapping Ripples Through the Field
Alarm doesn’t always look like panic. Sometimes it’s silence. Sometimes it’s a shift in the angle of a head, a stilling of motion, a single call, or a sudden absence. The birds don’t just respond individually—they broadcast, and their messages move.
Jon Young teaches that when alarm happens, it doesn’t just flare—it travels. A jay calls out. A robin dives into a thicket. A wren flutters up into a bush. A squirrel freezes. One by one, the landscape adjusts. This ripple is what he calls a shape of alarm—a spatial-temporal pattern, a moving signal, a map of nervous system response traveling across species lines.
These shapes can tell you what kind of threat has entered and where it’s going. A hawk flying low creates a horizontal slice of motion and tight, coordinated flushes. A weasel causes localized, erratic alarm. A human often sends out a wide, slow-moving ripple: song stops, companion calls shift, then a single sentinel bird gives voice—and the wave spreads.
If you are watching from a still sit spot, you can learn to track this movement. You begin to see how information travels. Not just among robins, but between robins and chickadees, between jays and squirrels, between titmice and wrens. A jay alarm might launch a ripple, but a deer ten yards away may also lift its head in response. The forest is cross-wired with sensitivity.
And here’s the part that matters most: you can learn to recognize your own ripple.
Walk into the woods and pay attention not to what you see—but to what changes when you arrive. Which birds go silent? Who lifts their head? Who vanishes? You’ve just dropped a stone in the pond. The pattern it makes is yours.
These are the shapes of your pressure—the imprint of your body, your energy, your intention on a living field.
Learning to see them isn’t about guilt or control. It’s about relationship. It’s about seeing yourself as something that enters—and affects—a finely tuned system. And it’s about learning how to move in a way that makes fewer ripples, or at least more honest ones.
Sit Spot as Apprenticeship to the Field
Sit spot isn’t a technique. It’s a relationship.
In Jon Young’s world, the sit spot is the core routine of bird language—not because you see the most there, but because you change the most there. You return to one place, again and again. You sit. You wait. You listen. Not for answers, but for baseline. For the return of the ordinary. For song.
What you’re really doing is apprenticing to attention.
The first few times, you might not notice much. Or maybe everything flies away. The birds don’t sing. The forest holds its breath. That’s your first lesson. You don’t need a field guide. You don’t need a checklist. You need to sit long enough for the truth of your presence to become visible—and for the landscape to decide whether or not to let you back in.
Then one day, something shifts.
You’re still enough. Soft enough. Quiet—not just in your body, but in your seeking. A robin sings. A junco hops nearby. The wind moves. And for the first time, you realize: they’ve accepted me. You didn’t earn it. You didn’t deserve it. You just waited long enough without pressing.
This is the real beginning of bird language. Not identification. Not interpretation. But integration.
You start to notice your own patterns: the kinds of thoughts that make the field go tight, the moments when your breath gets shallow and the chickadees flick away. You see the shape of your own nervous system mirrored in the lives around you.
And you begin to understand: the birds aren’t reacting to you. They’re reacting to the pressure you bring.
So you practice. Not to control, but to become honest. To meet the world with less demand. To let song be your barometer—not of how good you are, but of how present you are.
Over time, the sit spot becomes more than a place. It becomes a way of being. It teaches you to return, to listen, to relinquish urgency, to be received without needing to be seen.
Glossary for Meditators Learning Bird Language
A shared vocabulary of presence, awareness, and field-based feedback
Baseline.
The state of the forest when it is at ease. Birds are singing, feeding, calling to each other without alarm. A sign that your presence has been absorbed into the field.
Departure from Baseline.
A shift in the landscape—often subtle—when ordinary activity stops. May involve silence, stillness, or abrupt movement. Indicates that your presence (or another’s) has caused a change in the system.
Alarm.
The voice of alert. Often sharp, repetitive, or urgent. May be vocal (calls) or behavioral (flushes, freezes, sudden flight). A signal that something is being perceived as a threat.
Pre-Alarm.
The pause before alarm. A break in companion calls, a subtle stillness, a sentinel bird lifting its head. These early signals offer the most precise feedback on subtle tension or pressure.
Resonance.
The tone of your presence. Not what you intend, but how you are felt. Birds and other animals respond not just to what you do, but to what you carry.
Pressure.
A subtle form of reaching, seeking, or insistence. Can be mental, emotional, or somatic. Often unconscious. Pressure creates ripple; ripple disrupts baseline.
Field.
The relational space in which awareness is felt—not just between humans, but across species. The field includes sound, breath, posture, attention, and all that moves between beings.
Ripple.
The effect your presence has on the field. May travel across species: a flush of sparrows, a squirrel freezing, a robin falling silent. A way to track the real-time impact of your awareness.
Owl Eyes.
A wide-angle, soft gaze that takes in the whole field without focusing. Allows you to receive rather than seek. Often produces less disturbance in the field.
Non-Interference.
A form of emptiness not based on absence, but on non-disruption. You are still present—but no longer shaping the space. The field accepts you as part of it.
Sentinel.
A bird (often a jay, robin, wren, or other vigilant species) who acts as a lookout. Their calls often indicate your impact on the field before other species react.
Five Voices.
A framework from bird language:
- Song – baseline and territorial signaling
- Companion Call – connection and cohesion
- Territorial Aggression – conflict within a species
- Begging – juvenile calls to adults
- Alarm – alerting others to danger or disruption
Return to Baseline.
A sacred threshold in this practice. When song returns and birds resume feeding in your presence, the system is signaling that it no longer needs to brace against you.
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